Filmreihe

ISLANDS ON THE SCREEN: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CARIBBEAN CINEMA 
 

In Howard Hawks’ adventure romance To Have and Have Not (1944), set on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, the character of Marie “Slim” Browning (Lauren Bacall in her first film, playing opposite Humphrey Bogart) is asked where she is from. “Port-of-Spain, Trinidad,” she replies, naming both the southernmost island of the Caribbean archipelago and its capital, at the time the main city of what was an English colony. 

Lauren Bacall may have been many things, but Trinidadian she was not. And neither is To Have and Have Not a Caribbean film but a Hollywood production, made in Hollywood. It is one example of any number of films, made in the period from the silent era right through to roughly just after the middle of the last century, that were set in the Caribbean and either shot in Hollywood or on location in the islands, that represented, and often misrepresented, the region to the world. 

At that time, the idea of an indigenous Caribbean cinema, a cinema made by Caribbean filmmakers, dealing with their own societies and cultures, was largely just that, an idea. Most of the Caribbean was still under colonial—English, French, Dutch, Spanish—rule, while nominally independent countries like Haiti and Cuba were in disadvantageous neocolonial relationships with the United States. 

Caribbean cinema, therefore, from the moment it truly began to emerge in the mid-twentieth century, has always been concerned with doing more than being mere entertainment, providing escapist fantasy for its audiences. Alongside the indigenous literature that also began to appear in earnest post-World War II, Caribbean films started doing the very necessary work of reflecting an historically marginalised and oppressed people in need of validation back to themselves. It also sought, if indirectly, to counter the often exoticised, reductive, and outright racist representations of the region perpetrated by Hollywood and other outsiders. 

There were, of course, scattered, individual efforts at making indigenous Caribbean films during the first several decades of the twentieth century. To locate the start of Caribbean cinema production in any significant way, however, one could begin in the early 1950s, in Puerto Rico, which was (and remains) a territory of the United States. It was here that a group of filmmakers, under the banner of a government film unit but with political and artistic ideas of their own, began making short documentaries and fiction films. The films were realist and often poetic, employing as actors ordinary people whose lives informed the stories being told, of rural life, community building, and working-class solidarity. 

Yet it was in the 1960s that the most significant development in Caribbean cinema to date began. The Cuban Revolution ushered in a new era in the island’s history and with it a state-funded film industry and an anti-imperialist cinema that, in addition to being at the vanguard of an indigenous Caribbean cinema, was also integral to the liberationist Third Cinema emerging from Latin America more broadly. 

As the cinema from Cuba flourished, films from the rest of the Caribbean began to emerge. These films came in the wake of independence for some of the territories, with both Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago gaining their political freedom in 1962. (Other, mostly British territories followed right through the 1970s, with the majority of the Dutch territories remaining tied to the Netherlands for much longer, and the French departments remaining such to this day.) 

Chief among the films was the Jamaican classic The Harder They Come (1972), Perry’s Henzell’s gritty dive into the desperate attempts of a musician, iconically played by Jimmy Cliff, to burst free of the ghetto and become a star. The film was an international success partly due to its borrowing of Blaxploitation tropes, but also because of its immersion in the world of reggae music and Rastafarian culture, with which artists like Cliff and, in particular, Bob Marley and the Wailers, were at that very moment conquering the world. 

The film was also a huge hit in Jamaica itself, where audiences were thrilled to see the first real representation of themselves on the big screen. The fight of Jimmy Cliff’s character, Ivan, to overcome his poverty-stricken circumstances, a fight stymied at every turn by those in authority, also resonated with a people who were seeing the utopian promise of independence from Britain fade in the face of ongoing economic hardship and increasing violence. 

Other films began to emerge elsewhere in the Caribbean that reflected a similar post-independence mood, and a desire for liberation more generally. These included the Trinidad and Tobago political drama Bim (Hugh A. Robertson, 1974), the allegorical Surinamese romance One People (Pim de la Parra, 1976), and the Guyanese anti-imperialist agitprop documentary The Terror and the Time (The Victor Jara Collective, 1979). 

The 1980’s saw the acclaimed release of Sugar Cane Alley (1983), Euzhan Palcy’s period tale of coming of age in Martinique, an adaptation of a classic novel. A protege of François Truffaut, Palcy was the first female Caribbean filmmaker to direct a fiction feature on her own. She would then become the first black woman to direct a Hollywood studio film, when she made the anti-apartheid drama A Dry White Season (1989). 

Sadly, the great wave of Caribbean cinema that the first films promised was not to be. Economic downturn, political instability, and other factors meant that few feature films were made by the region’s filmmakers over the next couple of decades, with even the once mighty Cuban cinema output dwindling to only one or two films a year. 

The coming of the new millennium and the digital revolution, however, brought renewed promise, and a modest if noteworthy flowering of cinema from a new generation of filmmakers. The teenage drama drama Rain (2008), by Maria Govan of the Bahamas, Jamaican Storm Saulter’s Better Mus’ Come (2011), a period political drama that harks back to The Harder They Come, and Arí Maniel’s Cruz’s Puerto Rican drama of rural life Before the Rooster Crows (2016), show Caribbean filmmakers’ continuing concern for the wellbeing of the region’s underprivileged masses. 

Films from the Dominican Republic, in particular, have been winning plaudits at film festivals, with local production being stimulated in recent years by the introduction of a tax rebate, the building of studio facilities, and the founding of a film school. Recent films include Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias’ Cocote, 2017), a profound meditation on the violence that continues to haunt the region; La Hembrita (2023), Laura Amelia Guzmán’s welcome study of the Dominican bourgeoisie; and Yoel Morales’s scabrous and subversive mockumentary Bionico’s Bachata (2024). 

Haiti, against deep ongoing political instability and economic hardship, continues to produce a range of compelling cinema. Gessica Généus’s distaff drama Freda (2021), Miryam Charles’ diasporic docufiction elegy Cette Maison (2021), and Bruno Mourral’s comedy-thriller Kidnapping, Inc (2024) all reflect the desire of Haitian filmmakers to keep telling the story of the world’s first black republic, following the revolution that ended victoriously in 1804. And in Cuba, where state resources remain virtually non-existent, filmmakers are independently making international co-productions to keep the island’s great cinema tradition alive, as in the case of Marcos Antonio Díaz’s fantastical serio-comedy Fenomenas naturales (2024). 

The challenges that the Caribbean continues to face, as a space built upon hundreds of years of exploitation and oppression (years, concomitantly, of resistance and rebellion), are the challenges that its filmmakers also perennially face. Yet if one thing characterises these artistically diverse filmmakers working in various languages across a region also culturally and ethnically diverse, it’s their commitment to making their films, to telling their own stories in their own way and on their own terms. Whatever the future holds for Caribbean cinema, these are the ground rules by which it will proceed. 

Jonathan Ali is a London-based film programmer, curator, and writer. He began his career at the Trinidad and Tobago Festival, and is currently Director of Programming of Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami.